How to be happy part III: practical tips

It is our default state to be happy and we all work to that goal, one way or another. We all want to be happy and so this whole ‘how to be happy’ will be separated in four parts:

The first is about my life!
The second is just pure theory
The third will be practical tips
The fourth will be about self-reflection

So by now I have told you my life story and the theory of how people try to be happy, overcompensating, victim mentality, … in this article I am going to talk about the things you can actually do right away to feel better and so be happier.

sports

This is a well-known fact that if you exercise you will feel better immediately. When you sport you will release dopamine. Dopamine is a hormone that makes you happy. Every antidepressant is designed to release dopamine. That’s what drugs do too and even when you eat or drink fat and/or sugar rich drinks. I’m talking about heavy drugs here.
People who drink alcohol and are addicted to it they do it to ‘escape’ the world. It is an overcompensating behavior. They don’t like the world as it is, but when they drink they don’t care that the world is as it is in their eyes.

So sports are a good think to feel good about yourself immediately. People who get the runners high are the ones who have so much dopamine in their body they think they can handle anything that comes their way.

controlling you thinking

This is a very efficient one, but it takes more time and you need to do it every single time. Like I said in part II: negative thinking makes you take less risk to help you to life longer. Although that is a good thing when we were in prehistoric times, now its use is less relevant, but yet we need to learn how to recognize it and how to change it. This is how negative thinking begins: you think about something and then you kept thinking about it and more and more. Then you will talk about other subjects that occurred that made you feel the same way and by doing so that specific emotion will increase. So how do we change that downwards spiral and make it an upwards spiral?

The moment you sense that you are in that negative spiral, you say STOP and you think about something different immediately. That other thing can be what you will eat for diner, what you have to do, whatever. As long as you don’t think keep thinking about the same thing so that your negative emotion will decrease and the other (preferable positive) emotion will increase. In the beginning this will be hard. You have to keep doing it until you can do it automatically. By doing this exercise you change the pattern in your head from negative and keep being negative to positive so that in the end it will be a habit of doing so.

meditating, yoga or mindfulness

This one is so huge. By doing one of those three you will start to live more ‘in the moment’ as it is being called. People have stress and are busy with a lot of things that they just don’t live in the moment anymore. If you want inner peace or want to release yourself from stress than this will be a good thing to do. I will compare the three with each other from how I see it:

Mediating is the thinking.
Yoga is the doing.
Mindfulness is a combination of the two above.

All of them accomplished the same thing: start to live ‘in the moment’. Don’t think about the future nor the past. 15 minutes a day will make an enormous difference in your life.

reframing

The biggest problem that makes us unhappy is that we make all kind of assumptions that or not necessarily true, yet we act on them if they are a fact. So rather than seeing things as you assume they are, make assumptions that help you. For example: if you drive with your car and did something you know you shouldn’t do and someone honks at you, you can assume that he is mad at you or you can assume he honked at you so that you would think what you have done wrong and wanted to help you so that in the future you wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

Most of you think that latest is absurd and maybe you are right, but what will help you to be happier? Thinking someone is mad at you or that someone wanted to help you?
And with that I always think of the work of Katie Bryon. If you are interested you can search for her, but for this article those four questions are the most important ones:

Is it true?
Can I know absolutely that it is true?
How do I react when I think that thought?
How/who would I be without the thought?

With the example of the honking:

Is it true that he is mad at me?
Can I know absolutely that he is mad at me?
How do I react when I think he is mad at me?
How would I be without the thought that he is mad at me?

As you go through those questions you will notice that the emotions will change too and that is the point of it all.

accepting

People have a tendency to fight against things that they can’t change. It is sad that people spill their energy in something like this. You can fight that it is raining, but it will keep raining. You can fight that someone earn much money despite that he didn’t work as hard as you, but no matter what you say he has earned that money. It always comes back to this saying I once got:

There are so many things in this world that you need to accept, even if it is unfair. This really is to help you get of the victim mentality. Yes it is unfair that you work hard and do so much, but you don’t get the credit that you deserve. It is also unfair that there are people flushing their toilet with clean drinking water while there are people dying because they don’t have it. It is unfair, it is hard, but it is what it is.

doing the things you love

What are the things that you always wanted to do? Or even wanted to try?
In my case I always wanted to play the acoustic guitar, play the piano and the violin. I started with the guitar last year and I will keep doing so for the next year. But what are the things you like to do or wanted to try? Is it filming? Editing? Dancing?

Whatever it is see how you can do it. By doing so you feel great that you do the things you love and you have it under your control. This is most important: you need to control it, so that you can control the basic of your happiness. If you can’t control it than it isn’t a great basic is it? That is the same as building a house on a ground that isn’t stabile. Your house can collapse sooner or later.

This goes beyond just doing things, it also counts for things you want to do for people. If I would ask you to pick me up in the middle of the night because my car doesn’t start and you say yes, do you help me because you want to or that I will give you back something sooner or later? If people ask me if they can borrow my truck because they relocate somewhere else then I say yes. Why? Because I love to drive and I also tell them that I will help where I can, but I am lazy. So I do the things I love to do and if I ask my friends something in return and they won’t help me then so be it.

If you keep doing those things you will notice that after some time your emotions and reactions will be different. That’s the point of everything. Because this is how our brains works:

happening -> thought -> emotion - > reaction -> happening -> thought -> emotion -> happening -> …

It is an ongoing cycle. So if you learn to control your thoughts than your reaction will be different. Always try to see the things from a positive view. Train your brain to change old patterns and change them with new ones that will make you happy, that will be productive in your live. Go meditation so you feel relaxed, do the things your love so your happiness is built on things you can control and do sports to feel good. Try to see what you need to accept and what you can change in this world.
How do you know how you see the world? What are your limiting beliefs? How do you change them?
That are the questions I will answer in my next post.

Until then take care!